Publication Name

KICK THE HABIT

THE CYCLE – COUNT AND ANALYSE

What gets measured, gets managed

Counting and analyzing the emissions that you need to eliminate, and the

options you have for doing so, is the most crucial step in the cycle, because

without this knowledge you will be working in the dark. It enables you to de-

cide the priorities for action – from the food you eat and the products you buy

to energy use and transport – and to start monitoring your progress. Anyone

starting on a diet will be sure to step on the scales the first day, partly to know

the extent of the problem and also to have a baseline for recording their (pre-

sumed) progress towards their target weight. So you need an inventory.

The inventory aims at answering questions such as:

Which operations, activities, units should be included?

Which sources should be included?

Who is responsible for which emissions?

Which gases should be included?

Step one: Set up your inventory

Step two: Count your emissions

When making an inventory of GHG emissions, we are immediately confront-

ed with the question of where to start, and where to end. We will probably

not want to stick at accounting for our CO

emissions alone, but include all

GHGs. There are several problems here. Carbon dioxide is the most abundant

of them, but several of the others, although much rarer, are far more destruc-

tive, molecule for molecule. So we will need to be familiar with the idea of

equivalence – the impact a GHG has on the atmosphere expressed in the

equivalent amount of CO

. The US Environmental Protection Agency provides

a helpful Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Converter to translate GHGs at

www.

epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/calculator.html

. Depending onwhat we

want our inventory for, it will need to provide different levels of transparency

and possibilities for verification. In particular if your goal is trading emissions,

a standardized approach is the only way to ensure that actual emissions in one

organization correspond to those in another and are offset in equal amounts.

Count and analyse